


cuddy 2

by romanticalgirl



Series: December Ficlets 2007 [19]
Category: House M.D.
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-17
Updated: 2013-03-17
Packaged: 2017-12-05 15:35:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/724901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romanticalgirl/pseuds/romanticalgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Originally posted 12-5-07</p>
    </blockquote>





	cuddy 2

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted 12-5-07

This is her world.

Some nights, when it’s been crazy in the clinic and she’s run ragged and it doesn’t seem worth it to go home by the time she’s finished, just to change shoes, change her shirt and come back again, she wanders the halls and breathes it all in. Hospital air and hospital food, sleep deprivation and medications. She can smell the sterile gauze and the iodine, the sharp tang of blood and the strangely electric charge in the air.

She watches the doctors as they move through the halls, internists and hospitalists and specialists, rubbing sleep from their eyes and drinking coffee, charts in their free hands as they talk in a kind of code to one another, filled with the acronyms and shorthand of medical care. She listens to their banter, some of it sharp and some soft, frustration and satisfaction and the living and the dying, all together in a specialized world built just for them.

She runs her fingers along the walls, feeling the smoothness of them, feeling them flow. There is constant movement here. Nothing rests in earnest – machines always beep, hearts always beat, breath always flows. Nothing stops until it stops, and even then everything else is doubled, trying to make up for the loss – crash carts and electric paddles and epinephrine pushed and CPR and hands on hearts and mouths breathing air and it goes on and on and on until it stops.

And then the doors of the emergency room open and another body comes in, another life admitted to her world where she plays Zeus to her mountain of Gods, handing down life and death in a sentence where half the words are missing and they’re all just filling in the blanks.


End file.
